Losing Interest - by Scott W Schwartz Paperback

Book Synopsis

Nothing about endless capitalist growth is normal.
Across thousands of years of human history, most cultures have placed explicit social and moral restrictions on economic growth, with charging interest scorned as benefiting from another's hardship and profit-making as divisive. So how did interest rates, monetary gains, and return on investment come to rule our modern world?

Though most economic histories tell this story as one of overcoming superstition in favor of social progress, Losing Interest explains how the concept of "interest" had to be continuously rehabilitated over six centuries of European colonial expansion, transforming profit from a mortal sin into a business model. From early Medici innovations in banking to the development of insurance schemes in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, our current economic system was built on legal and financial tools that abstract capital from the ongoing reality of deception, theft, and mass murder at its core.

With wit and lyricism, anthropologist Scott W. Schwartz makes a clear, commonsense appeal for our shared wellbeing against capitalism's nonsensical demand for widespread suffering to produce the mounting wealth of the few. In the spirit of David Graeber, Thomas Piketty, and Kohei Saito, Losing Interest serves as a prequel to contemporary degrowth literature, illuminating the history and mechanics of how interest has risen to take from the poor and give to the rich.

Review Quotes

"Scott W. Schwartz exposes the hidden coercive mechanism that made endless growth seem natural: interest. Tracing its normalization over centuries, this book shows how modern economies were locked into compulsory expansion, ecological devastation, and deepening inequality. Rejecting techno-fixes and "green growth" illusions, Losing Interest argues that the real task is to end the growth imperative itself. A sharp, unsettling contribution to degrowth thought, this book challenges readers to imagine a post-capitalist world beyond accumulation."--Kohei Saito, author Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto
"Losing Interest offers what so many economic histories deny--an expansive, creative, and forceful account about how some of our basic economic tenets came to be. In deep conversation with philosophers like David Graeber and James C. Scott, this book is a wonderful contribution to the question of who economic growth is for, and why. Schwartz offers both new facts of economic history as well as a new approach to writing about it. A real accomplishment."--Leigh Claire La Berge, author of Fake Work: How I Began to Suspect Capitalism Is a Joke

About the Author

Scott W. Schwartz is an
Adjunct Associate Professor of Anthropology at the City University of New York
researching how exploitation and injustice become
normal. He is also the author of An Archaeology of Temperature: Numerical
Materials in the Capitalized Landscape (Routledge, 2022).